US developing giant data bases for counter-terrorism

WashingtonNovember 18 2002

The Pentagon has quietly embarked on a program to develop revolutionary information systems that will sweep up data on billions of electronic transactions to detect the secret movements of terrorist groups, officials say.

The program, which the Pentagon calls "Total Information Awareness", has only recently begun to attract the attention of critics who see it as an Orwellian assault on privacy with vast potential for abuse.

It is the brainchild of retired rear admiral John Poindexter, the former national security adviser who was at the centre of the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

Poindexter, who later worked for high tech companies, was named head of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) earlier this year.

He has sketched out a vision of revolutionary new information systems that could suck in billions of transactions from government and commercial data bases and mine them for telltale traces of terrorist activities.
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"If terrorist organisations are going to plan and execute attacks against the United States, their people must engage in transactions and they will leave signatures in this information space," he said in a speech last March.

He likened it to "finding submarines in a world of noise".

"We must find terrorists in a world of noise, understand what they are planning, and develop options for preventing their attacks," he said. "If we are to preserve our national security, we must figure out a way of combating this threat."

Data on commercial transactions would supplement conventional US intelligence collection in a "grand data base" unlike anything that currently exists, according to the Office of Information Awareness.

The office invited proposals in March, including for "development of revolutionary technology for ultra-large, all-source information repositories and associated privacy protection technologies".

It also sought proposals for technologies that "allow humans and machines to think together about complicated and complex problems more efficiently and effectively".

A third objective was to develop a prototype system that would combine technology from existing DARPA programs and apply them to counter-terrorism.